The Fall of Doctor Onslow (8 page)

In the summer of 1859, Christian sat with Jemmy Baker under a willow-tree, sheltered from the sun’s glare by the layered curtain of its leaves. The river Avon flowed by like moving glass, and all else around them was still in the heat-haze – only a few crickets cheeped in the grass. The two young men sprawled with their coats off, their collars loosened, and their boots discarded, but they were still distressingly hot.

A year at Oxford had strengthened Christian, and given him both new friends and intellectual food, but it had not altered his feelings for Jemmy as his father hoped. Jemmy’s beauty, like Charton’s moral and physical squalor, remained constantly in his mind – as much at Oxford as in the vacations, when he had little to do. He wanted never to forget Jemmy, but he wished he could rid himself of all memories of Charton. It amazed him that in what ought to have been his present contentment, he could not stop thinking about the corruption he had seen there, and wondering precisely what it was Onslow and Bright had done together. Sometimes it crossed his mind that perhaps there had been nothing but a few kisses between them, but the words of Onslow’s note, hot as the day, seemed to make that unlikely. Christian still kept the three pieces of paper he had received nearly eighteen months ago: Bright’s note in chapel, Bright’s letter, Onslow’s extract.

Jemmy was, in his own fashion, as disturbing as memories of Charton. Even after a year’s friendship, he was wholly passive; he initiated nothing. He wrote short letters to Christian at Oxford only when Christian begged him,
and never seemed really to understand the nature of the love which Christian explained. But he said that he liked to receive Christian’s letters, and he was still prepared to give up the greater part of his Sundays to him during the vacations. He admired Christian greatly, and was anxious to get on in the world: to this end Christian was teaching him a little Latin, at his own request.

This was the first Sunday of the Long Vacation, and Christian had not seen Jemmy for over two months.

‘I am so glad to have been able to see you before I leave for Switzerland,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes. You’ll be away a long time, shan’t you?’ said Jemmy.

‘A month. Yes, quite a long time – I wish you might come too.’ Christian was to join a combined walking and reading party in the Swiss Alps, headed by two Fellows of his college, one of whom was a founder member of the Alpine Club, while the other looked forward to reading Romantic poems aloud in suitable natural surroundings as much as to exploring Greek texts. ‘If it had not been for seeing you, I would have remained in London till our party leaves,’ continued Christian.

‘Would you, sir?’ In general, Jemmy called Christian nothing, but occasionally a ‘sir’ slipped out.

‘Don’t call me sir, Jemmy. I wonder why you find it so hard to say Christian.’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like the right thing, precisely. I don’t know why.’

‘What a foolish boy you are.’

Christian rolled over on his stomach, and smelt the hay-like grass. Then he raised his head.

‘Why don’t we bathe?’

‘Bathe?’ said Jemmy stupidly. ‘But you can only bathe in the sea.’

‘Wherever did you get such a notion? At Oxford everyone bathes in the river – surely you have done so before?’

‘I can’t swim.’

‘That’s of no importance, the water’s not deep. Don’t you wish to?’

Jemmy said:

‘Maybe, but someone might see us.’

‘Oh, that’s hardly likely, this is a very secluded place. Come.’ Christian got up, and took off his waistcoat and necktie.

‘They’d think it wrong, if they did see.’

‘Jemmy, there is nothing wrong, immoral, about nakedness. All the athletes were naked in Greece.’ Christian’s heart beat fast as he said this.

‘We’re not living in Greece,’ said Jemmy. He added: ‘And I was not thinking of being naked, I was thinking of the fish. They’d say we were disturbing the fish.’

Christian, surprised by this, merely said:

‘No one will see, I’m sure of it.’ He wanted to say something to the effect that despite mere appearances, they were living in Greece, but somehow found it difficult, as he never had before.

‘I don’t know,’ Jemmy told him.

‘Surely you know that not a soul has come near us since we got here,’ said Christian, a little impatiently. ‘Well, even if you won’t bathe, I shall.’ He unbuttoned his trousers, and stood before Jemmy in his shirt-tails. His ruffled, flyaway hair made a shaggy halo round his head. Then he removed his shirt and undershirt and stood naked. His figure was not beautiful, but it was better than his face: its only real fault was that it was too thin.

‘Come Jemmy,’ he said.

‘Very well, if you want,’ said the other; and slowly, with lowered eyes, he began to undress.

Christian did not watch this process, because he sensed that Jemmy did not want him to. Instead, he made his way down the short bank and through the fringe of riverside plants, into the cool of the water. Sharply sucking in his breath, he flopped down into it, and performed a few breast-strokes. A mental picture of white nude Jemmy was constantly before his eyes as he waited for the reality to appear. Suddenly he thought: I’ll teach him to swim. Now Christian saw himself holding Jemmy up in the water.

‘Is it very cold?’

Christian turned quickly, and then saw that Jemmy still had his shirt on.

‘It’s delightful. Take your shirt off!’

Rather roughly, Jemmy obeyed him, and cast the shirt away. He stood there with his arms dangling uncomfortably, and a faint breeze lifting his hair. Then at last Christian saw that his figure was just as he had imagined: there before him were the square shoulders, the slim hips and the little bottom all as white as a white-fleshed peach. Jemmy’s penis was not large, but was well-shaped and well-coloured, surrounded by light brown hair. Christian glanced at it, then raised his eyes quickly to the boy’s face, though an image of it remained in his mind.

‘Let me teach you to swim,’ he said, wading forward, showing his own ruddy penis above the water-line. The river was less than four feet deep even in the middle, and Christian knew it was not the best place for learning to swim. But it would do.

‘If you like.’ Jemmy trod uncertainly towards the river, disliking the feel of plants under his bare feet.

‘Plunge in,’ said Christian, wanting to pull him into the water.

‘Ooh! It’s cold.’

Jemmy did not plunge in, but climbed doggedly down. Having agreed to bathe, he thought it would be cowardly to withdraw only because the water was colder than he had expected, but he wished he had never said yes.

‘Shall I teach you how to swim?’ said Christian again. ‘I’ll have to hold you up in the water.’

Jemmy, who had just forced himself to dip his head in, gazed at him out of eyes covered with fronds of hair-like pale seaweed.

‘Will you?’ he said, pushing his hair back.

‘You look like a male Nereid. Yes, I shall have to hold you, just at first.’ Christian gripped the slimy pebbles of the riverbed with his toes, put a hand on either side of Jemmy’s taut waist, and clasped it. ‘Now lie flat on your stomach,’ he said. ‘Imagine you are in bed. There. Let your legs rise up, the water will hold them.’

Jemmy managed to do as he was told, but had trouble keeping his face out of the water. ‘Paddle the water with your hands, and kick your legs,’ said Christian, still holding on tightly to Jemmy’s waist. ‘You’re swimming! I’m going to release my grip, very slowly …’ As soon as he did so, Jemmy gave way to temptation, and planted his feet back on the riverbed. Then he slipped, and went right under, and came up spluttering.

Christian laughed; not in mockery, even kind mockery, but out of happiness. After a second or two, Jemmy copied him. ‘I don’t think I’m just cut out for swimming,’ he said.

‘Nonsense! We could try again.’

‘No, thank’ee.’

‘Very well,’ said Christian. ‘But are you not enjoying the water?’

‘It’s passable, after being so hot.’

They spent some ten minutes in the river, dipping and paddling, and shyly flicking water at each other, laughing as they did so. Then Jemmy decided he was growing cold, and Christian followed him out.

‘We must allow the sun to dry us before we put on our clothes,’ he said. To be naked with Jemmy on the grass, he thought, would be better even than being naked with him in the river. He planned to weave a wreath of flowers, and place it on Jemmy’s head, and call him a shepherd of Arcadia.

‘Pity we didn’t think to bring towels.’

‘Yes,’ said Christian, speaking uncertainly.

Jemmy seemed to have lost all self-consciousness about being naked. He stood stretching upwards, yawning, his flanks adorned with drops of water; and Christian stared at him. New feelings were roused in him, but old words came to his lips.

‘Do you know how very beautiful you are?’ As he said this, Christian stepped forward, and laid a finger, then a hand, on the small of Jemmy’s back. ‘You have come straight to me from out of ancient Hellas.’

Christian’s penis, soft and gentle throughout their time in the river, was now quite suddenly raised and huge.

‘Let me kiss you.’

Jemmy felt the active penis brush against him. He had never rejected the light kisses Christian planted on his forehead, never objected to praise of his beauty, and Christian now waited, breathing stertorously, with his eyes narrowed and his face flushed.

‘If you want to kiss someone, you ought to kiss a girl.’ Jemmy moved away from Christian’s hand, which had descended from his back to the upper slope of his right buttock.

‘Jemmy!’ Gasping, Christian saw that the boy’s own penis was erect, almost fully erect as he struggled into his drawers. ‘Jemmy.’

‘I don’t want to kiss you, that’s all.’

‘But I can tell you do!’

‘I don’t!’ Jemmy pulled on his trousers and buttoned them, and after a moment, Christian realised that he too must put on his clothes, wet and shaking though he was.

When they were both dressed, he said to Jemmy:

‘If I have offended you, will you forgive me?’

‘Yes,’ said Jemmy, not looking at him.

‘You will still be my friend?’

‘Yes, but I’d like to go home now.’

Christian did not believe that he was forgiven. He was sure that Jemmy would seek to avoid him now, sure that he had ruined everything by one sudden piece of Charton-like behaviour. The drive back to Salisbury was silent, and when they reached Jemmy’s mother’s lodgings, Jemmy confirmed Christian’s suspicions by jumping out of the dog-cart without offering his hand for a squeeze or his forehead for a peck. It was the end, thought Christian.

To Christian, the thought that he had behaved like Onslow was almost worse than the thought that Jemmy would no longer wish to see him. He had believed that he was incapable of feeling simple lust, that his need to worship a beautiful boy had everything to do with the Ideal and nothing to do with the penis. It was true that in ‘Hellas’ there was physical love, but Christian believed that it was somehow quite a different thing from the sexual indulgences of Charton boys, especially the indulgences of Onslow and Bright. It was a more passionate version of the keen chaste love he had felt for Jemmy till that blazing day, a holy celebration of nudity such as he had tried and failed to make.

In the few days before he left for Switzerland, Christian tried to persuade himself that the desires he felt beside the Avon had also been a glorious and noble thing, but accustomed though he was to self-deceit, he was unable to do so. It was all too recent, he could remember it too clearly, he knew too well it was not love of the heavenly Ideal he felt, not when Jemmy’s penis had been erect too. And yet Jemmy had rightly, despite his own involuntary excitement, rejected him for betraying ‘Hellas’.

The dark Onslow-self inside him must be rooted out and crushed – like Onslow, who must be responsible for its growing inside him.

*

Although when he went abroad Christian had no conscious plan of what to do with it, he took the evidence against his
old headmaster with him to Switzerland. For several days he took it out whenever he was alone, and contemplated it – it seemed to him that if he were not careful, he would one day express himself in similar terms, and talk of sofas rather than of Plato. He thought of how he had treasured these pieces of paper, and yet till now had never thought of taking any action – he had been able to ignore the sordidness of others’ lives. When Bright first made his revelation, it had not once occurred to him to send the incriminating pieces of paper to Charton’s trustees, or anything of that kind. He had accepted Bright’s demand that he keep silence, and had merely become a cynic.

Even now, Christian wondered whether he were capable of taking any kind of action. Mixed with his increased hatred of Onslow’s memory there was a new, distinct sympathy for him, the sympathy of one who could understand the power of unwanted impulses: but when he thought of giving way to this sympathy, and maintaining silence, Christian felt panic. To continue helping conceal the evil, as Bright had made him swear he would, would be to send himself down the criminal path at the end of which ‘Hellas’ was a brothel. He needed to teach himself what happened to men who corrupted the sweetest of dreams, yet after many days and nights of worrying, he could not decide whether he had a real right to act.

In the end, after he had been abroad for a week, Christian decided that he would explain a part of the situation and seek advice. He reviewed his acquaintance with considerable care, and the man he at length chose to confide in was Mr Fergus Mildmay, one of the Fellows of Magdalen who had organised the trip to Switzerland.

Mr Mildmay was a don who seemed to regard undergraduates not as the drawback to an academic life, but as one of its chief pleasures. He and Christian had had several discussions about Greek art and philosophy, the
Phaedrus
and the
Symposium
, and understood each other very well. No mentor could have been more different from Onslow than Mr Mildmay, thought Christian – and yet, Mildmay was also a clergyman, and interested in young men. He was
tall and ugly, with a gentle tongue and a kind heart, but rigid principles.

One morning when all other members of their party were out on the mountain, Christian told Mildmay that he was in sore need of advice, and then haltingly explained his dilemma: Bright had sworn him to secrecy, yet he could not be sure that in such a case as this, it was right to keep his word. He then described the case as delicately as he could, without looking Mildmay in the eye. Mildmay listened to him in astonished silence, asking only whether or not he had proof, and then, forgetting the sprained ankle which had recently confined him to the house, he jumped up. At last he said, staring across at the mountains and nursing his foot:

‘My dear Anstey-Ward, I cannot tell you, cannot tell you, how sorry I am. God bless my soul! That you should have discovered your own headmaster, a doctor of divinity, in such a – a – I cannot find words to express it. No, indeed!’ ‘God bless my soul’ was the strongest expression Mildmay ever used.

‘But what am I to do, sir?’ said Christian. ‘It has been preying on my conscience for so long. I suppose I ought not to have consulted you, because of course to do so I had to break Bright’s trust in me, but I know that if you think I ought to keep his trust from now on you won’t say a word more about it.’

‘No, no! It is your positive duty to break the poor boy’s trust, Anstey-Ward, in such a case as this.’

There was a long pause. Christian felt oddly cold and flat now that he had confessed Onslow’s sin instead of his own – he thought of Jemmy, whom he had of course not mentioned, and wondered what would happen. He had suspected that Mildmay would not say he must keep his word to Bright, but the consideration that Bright had spoken in confidence had nonetheless weighed quite heavily with him: for eighteen months he had accepted the schoolboy code of honour with regard to not telling tales, and it had been hard to release himself from it, even under the pressure of his own needs.

‘When you say it is my duty to break his trust,’ he said slowly at last, as Mr Mildmay continued to shake his head to himself in private distress, ‘do you mean for the sake of the boys at Charton – the very bad effect Dr Onslow has had on them?’ He continued quickly: ‘I saw things which I don’t like to describe to you – the endemic moral corruption – it was everywhere.’ He wanted to talk about this very much, quite as much as about Onslow.

Mildmay stared at him. ‘Dr Onslow’s personal failings are inexcusable, but yet that does not mean he has not been an admirable schoolmaster. He is celebrated, justly so, for the moral reformation which he has wrought at Charton!’

Christian was astonished by Mildmay’s seeming unwillingness to believe in the appalling state of Charton, in view of the way in which he had quickly been persuaded that Onslow himself had enjoyed a love-affair with a pupil. The mere mention of written proof had been enough. Then he remembered that Mildmay had been educated by tutors, not at a public school, till he went up to Oxford.

‘As far as this is concerned,’ he said, ‘there has been no reformation, I promise you.’

Mildmay licked his lips, unable to tolerate the pictures of dormitory orgies that sprang into his mind. ‘I cannot – cannot believe – I think the question is rather that a clergyman of the Church of England has shown himself in the most shocking way to be unfit to hold his office. Anstey-Ward, no consideration of – of what I might call merely worldly standards of honour, of confidence and so forth, ought to hold you back from exposing him. I am very, very sorry for it, but indeed it is your duty now to act against him!’

‘Exposing him? Publicly?’ cried Christian, suddenly appalled. ‘But I can’t, sir – I can’t! I could not take any action – what action? writing to
The
Times
– to the trustees, the Prime Minister? You must see it’s impossible!’ He could not bear the suggestion that he might bring Onslow down personally, and in the most brutal possible way. Even though he had briefly considered doing it, he knew now it would have to be someone else, someone who had never
been his pupil and did not share his passion, preferably Mildmay.

Mildmay said sternly: ‘Will you not even demand privately that he resign? He cannot be allowed to remain in an honourable position and one moreover where he is exposed to temptation. Even though he has done much good –’

‘He has done no good!’

‘If that were true it would be all the more reason to oblige him to retire.’

Breathing quickly, they watched each other.

‘Oh, my dear Anstey-Ward,’ said the other, suddenly relaxing and placing a hand on his knee. ‘Forgive me. I think I understand. You have hesitated for so long and are now so reluctant very largely because you held Dr Onslow in peculiar reverence and affection, did you not? You felt for him that love of a pupil for a wise master, and the discovery that he had feet of clay, I might almost say of, er,
effluent
–’ he laughed nervously, tapping Christian’s knee with his fingernail – ‘was indescribably painful to you? No wonder the thought of doing as I suggested is abhorrent to you. It does credit to your heart, whatever else.’

Christian looked at him dumbly as this misunderstanding grew to gigantic proportions in Mildmay’s mind.

‘But you see,’ continued Mildmay, ‘the fact that you love him does not make it less necessary that he be at least removed – perhaps not publicly exposed and disgraced, no. I was allowing anger to overcome me, when I suggested that.’

‘No,’ said Christian in a low voice.

‘I think that what you should do is simply to inform your father. Dr Anstey-Ward is well able to handle so delicate and painful a situation on your behalf. Bless my soul, yes indeed! You will have discharged your duty in telling him. I cannot think either God or man would require you to involve yourself more closely in something so deeply distressing to you.’

Christian’s sense of what was honest was keen enough to force him to say: ‘I didn’t love Onslow, sir, as master or – or anything else – I almost hate him for what he has done.’

This Mr Mildmay took as proof of such pure love as he would have liked to receive himself from all his students. He sighed, his hand still on Christian’s knee and his eyes on the wide water of Lake Brienz.

‘Write to your father, Anstey-Ward, and send him the notes you possess. Trust him to do what is right. Do this – please do this.’

Christian said nothing.

‘You must. I do assure you that you must.’

‘Yes,’ said Christian eventually. ‘I suppose so.’ Though he spoke with such hesitation, he saw that a tolerable solution had been found, thanks to Mildmay’s horrible mistake.

‘Do you have the letters here?’ said Mildmay, leaning forward. ‘No, I suppose you cannot have. It will have to wait until we are back in England.’

‘Yes, I do have them – they’re in my portmanteau, upstairs.’

‘Then write from here, enclosing them,’ said Mildmay. ‘If I can be of any assistance – to you or to your father, pray, pray do not hesitate to ask me.’

‘Thank you. I don’t doubt you’ve given me very good advice. I don’t know what my father will do, perhaps nothing, but it will be his decision – I shall tell him what you think.’

Christian got up from the bench where they were sitting, and went into the house. Having thrown the pebble to start a moral avalanche, he was walking like a drunken man.